Tag: Jean-Pierre Leaud

The Death of Louis XIV
Directed by Albert Serra
Opens March 31 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center
It was in the fall of 1958 that François Truffaut, on the recommendation of a fellow Cahiers du cinéma critic, auditioned the 14-year-old son of an assistant scriptwriter and an actress—an eighth-grader who was growing “unmanageable” at school, its head huffily informed Truffaut—to play the autobiographical protagonist of his first feature, The 400 Blows. The rest, as they...

Man Facing Southeast (1986)
Directed by Eliseo Subiela
In his work, Argentine auteur Eliseo Subiela (1944-2016) blended surrealism and magical realism in narratives that are partly philosophical, partly spiritual. Man Facing Southeast is his best-known film, if it’s known at all now in the US. A humanistic lo-fi sci-fi movie, it shares affinities with The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Starman (1984), and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s...

The Death of Louis XIV plays October 6 and 7 as part of the Explorations section of the 54th New York Film Festival. Cinema Guild will release the film theatrically. Follow our coverage of NYFF 2016 here.
A fundamental form of modernist naturalism seems to be what Albert Serra is reaching for in his new feature, The Death of Louis XIV. Jean-Pierre Léaud’s performance as the visibly decaying monarch could be described as “majestic” or “regal”...

Film festivals are what you make of them. Well, most of the time anyway. But it’s especially the case with a behemoth like the Toronto International Film Festival. With its 41st edition just concluded, TIFF is comfortably coasting into middle age, perhaps a bit too content to view itself as the center of gravity for the film world. With more than 400 films screening across 11 days, it’s by far North America’s biggest...